The opening questions, "What do you concentrate on / and who do you know?", sound like a bartender's small talk, a therapist's prompt, or a voice in one's own head. The poem never says which. The "you" that follows is almost certainly the speaker talking to his younger self, and what comes back is not an answer but a memory, a few bright pieces of a drive in "mother's blue Buick" down "a country dirt road." The title gives a clue about the rest. The number 3 suggests one poem in a sequence, and the subject, drunkenness, seems to mean more than drinking. The only drink-related word in the text is "ginger ale," and it appears in a negation. What the poem describes is being overwhelmed, by desire and by sentiment.
The memory is blunt and slightly comic. The Buick is a borrowed symbol of freedom, still tied to a mother. The girl's "huge tits" are named with a teenager's lack of polish, and the speaker's "ardor" is "enough to just about weep." That phrase is colloquial and a little deflating: "just about" takes the grandeur out of the emotion while admitting how large it felt. Then comes a fork. The grammar blurs, and "and escape or college friendship / dull, secure, to sleep" can be read as a choice between wild flight and a safe, sleepy companionship. The poem lays the two side by side and lets the reader feel the pull of both. "Weep" and "sleep" are the poem's one clear rhyme, and they are an odd pair, because they are both ways of giving in.
Elsewhere the poem avoids tidy sound patterns. It is free verse in short, plain lines with almost no punctuation, so the thoughts run on and the first long sentence never gets a main verb. It feels like remembering, or like the loose logic of a drunk mind. When the sound does gather, it gathers softly. "Rain" and "ale" share a long vowel, and "shadows," "leaves" and "washing" carry the hush of the afternoon.
That afternoon is the calmest passage. "You did find your way home / one late summer afternoon" can be taken literally, as the end of the drive. It can also be taken as a survivor's remark, since the speaker did get through. The "shadows of the green leaves / their washing sound" turn the scene gentle, and the leaves seem to wash over the speaker like water. The next line tries to name the feeling and nearly fails: "exquisite tender sentiment / neither here nor there." The diction is suddenly elevated, almost greeting-card language, and then the dismissive idiom "neither here nor there" lets the air out of it. The speaker seems unsure whether the feeling mattered or is just a haze, and the poem declines to decide.
The ending brings back the water the leaves only suggested. The image of "the fire" is left unexplained, but in context it reads as the burning of lust, longing and drink all at once. Against it the poem lists remedies that all fail: "water pure as the rain," "petals," "ginger ale." The sequence moves from nature to romance to the domestic, since ginger ale is what one might hand someone with an upset stomach. By ending there, the poem lets a sublime image slide into a soft drink, and the bathos is funny and sad together. Nothing in this list can put out the fire, whether it is pure, pretty or practical.
The poem is significant for how much honesty it fits into sixteen lines. It does not dress adolescent lust in poetic language, and it does not pretend that a distance of years makes the memory tidy. The tone moves between crude and tender, comic and aching, without apologizing for either. Its title also opens a wider reading. Drunkenness here is any state in which feeling outruns judgment, and the poem suggests that such states do not wear off but simply move out of reach, "neither here nor there," still warm in memory.